Tamara Ivanovna Chikunova, nee Petrova, Тамара Ивановна Чикунова (1948 – 31 March 2021) was an Uzbek human rights defender, campaigner against the death penalty and torture, and the founder of "
Mothers Against Death Sentence and Torture."
Born in
Tashkent, Chikunova began her campaigning after her son Dmitry was arrested in 1999 and
executed in July 2000 and she worked against the death penalty, which
Uzbekistan abolished in 2008. She won the ''
Colombe d'Oro'' and the 2005
Nuremberg International Human Rights Award
The Nuremberg International Human Rights Award is a German award founded on September 17, 1995. The date chosen is significant; 60 years earlier, the Nuremberg Race Laws were adopted. Also, on September 17, 1939, Poland was invaded by the Sovi ...
.
Finally the state of Uzbekistan adopted
United Nations civil rights pact and abolished the
death penalty
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...
.
Chikunova later moved to Italy, from where she campaigned across Europe, particularly against the continuing use of the death penalty in
Belarus, the only European state that still conducts executions.
She died on 31 March 2021 in the Italian town of Novara, where she lived in a
Sant'Egidio community.
References
Uzbekistani human rights activists
Anti-torture activists
Anti–death penalty activists
People from Tashkent
1948 births
2021 deaths
Uzbekistani women activists
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